James Bartholomew

There is a natural impulse in people to bring the rich and powerful down – to create equality and a better, more decent society. The impulse was drowned out for the latter part of the 20th century by knowledge in the West of how horribly wrong the Communist experiments had gone. However, new generations are growing up knowing little or nothing about what happened. They have no intellectual defence against the apparent idealism of Marxist thought and are increasingly tempted to accept it.

James Bartholomew is columnist and former editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph in London. He also worked for the Financial Times and the Far Eastern Economic Review, in Hong Kong and Tokyo. He is author of The Welfare of Nations. He coined the term “virtue signalling” in The Spectator in 2015.